Thirteenth Collection of Seven Dailies

Trying something: an Arena.
I introduce two characters, and you choose which of them will win a sporting contest of power.
The setting is the universe of the Portal, on the Front, more description of which will be revealed in the Arena and hopefully elsewhere as well. Next week the votes will be tallied and the battle described.

Andrew Fearus

A wide hand and wide brow, grim mouth and unexpected force of power. Few have met any of his family, but have heard much of his honor in their name of “Fearus”. His hair and clothes are dark and rather ragged when studying or fighting and not socializing.
He is shown in the image summoning a defense of tortoise shell.
– Imagined and depicted by Patrick Lauser

Harshade

A thing of night shadow, though friendly and humorous. His physical body consists of a smoke-like darkness, and he has a casual command of obscure powers. He is a first generation visitant of the Front. His preferred summoning is a claw gauntlet and helmet of hard and silent aerial crustacean shell into which he flows like the tide into a coastal cave.
He is shown shattering a sorcerer’s blade on his gauntlet.
– Imagined and depicted by Nathaniel Lauser

Suspended

I look down from the bottom of the well into a city. It is the wrong city: the way out was from the city I was born in, which was cut off from every other city.

I could go down. It might not be like the nightmare where I was born. So I could get out of the well, but I cannot get out… out.

I want to stay.

– Patrick Lauser

A more solemn and mental story, I hope I have captured the full sense of such a scenario.

The arrow was well directed, and struck his eye in the center of the pupil, but did not pierce it. It slipped, caught under his eyelid, jerking his head backwards, and the arrow continued on its flight, and he continued pressing forward. He had not blinked.

– Patrick Lauser
(A random description without context found among story ideas from four years ago.)

(This note is quite without context: next comes:

“The concept that wounds let part of a person’s spirit (or a kind of spirit that is in everyone, or in a certain group of people) out of their body into the spirit world, and that the corpse must be sealed and preserved (mummified) in a very specific way in order to keep as much of it, or a vital part of it, within the body.”